{science} – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 763

I Live in Shock (1955) by Mimi Parent.

• At Public Domain Review: “Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare (1922) is at turns obtuse, grotesque, and moralizing—and sought to provoke the obscenity trial of the century. Only it didn’t, quietly vanishing instead. Colin Dickey rereads this failed satire, finding a transcendent rhythm pulsing beneath the novel’s indulgent prose.”

• “There are no surprises when a pallet of CDs arrives at my office, but when a pressing plant alerts me to a shipment of records headed my way I start to worry.” John Brien, head of Important Records, on the problems involved in the manufacture of vinyl albums.

• The sixth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

They were building a vast alternative religion with a lack of dictates but no shortage of rituals and icons. They’d pass through the end of the world to get there first; the next album was based on a vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse slaughtering their animals and constructing a earth-gouging machine from their jawbones, demonstrating they weren’t quite intending to settle down yet. It would take them far from mainstream culture, and indeed mainstream gay culture given their repeated disdain for sanitised queerness, and into enigmatic territory. Having scared away most fans of synth pop and industrial with provocation, and the weak and tyrannical with ambiguity, they were unencumbered and “allowed to mature in the dark”, sustained by a cult following (you rarely encounter a tepid fan of Coil, most are acolytes).

Darran Anderson looking back at Coil’s debut album, Scatology

• At Smithsonian Magazine: See 15 winning images from the Close-Up Photographer of the Year Competition.

• At The Daily Heller: How did pink become a colour? Meanwhile, Steven Heller’s font of the month is Vibro.

• New music: Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds by Lawrence English.

• SciURLs: A science news aggregator.

• Shackleton’s favourite albums.

• RIP Marianne Faithfull.

• The Pink Panther Theme (1963) by Henry Mancini | The Pink Room (1988) by Seigen Ono | Pink (2005) by Boris

Weekend links 762

Aquarius from the 1971 Astrologicalendar by Peter Max. Via.

• AOS of London: Psychogeographia Zosiana is a map guide to the London of Austin Osman Spare with accompanying illustrations by Ben Thompson. The book also contains an interview transcript in which Alan Moore talks about the importance of Spare’s work, and a contextual history by Gavin W. Semple.

• Emigre was “…a (mostly) quarterly magazine published from 1984 until 2005 in Berkeley, California, dedicated to visual communication, graphic design, typography, and design criticism.” The magazine ran for 69 issues which can be downloaded here.

• “The ultimate reason for initiating something ambitious is not to fulfill certain notions but to find out what surprises might emerge.” Stewart Brand, quoted in a long read by Alec Nevala-Lee about the Clock of the Long Now.

• At the Criterion Current: David Hudson on David Lynch’s life and work, an overview of the reaction to last week’s news. I was surprised to find my comments about Alan Splet included in the collection.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on the connections between Charles Williams’ The Place of the Lion and an obscure piece of fiction (or is it?) by Ruaraidh Erskine.

• At Public Domain Review: Illustrations by Jay van Everen from The Laughing Prince: A Book of Jugoslav Fairy Tales and Folk Tales (1921).

• At Colossal: Beguiling botanicals fluoresce in Tom Leighton’s otherworldly photographs.

• New music: Glory Fades by Yair Elazar Glotman & Mats Erlandsson.

• Old music: Cités Analogues by Lightwave.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Georges Perec Day.

• The Clock Strikes Twelve (1959) by Bo Diddley | Clock Factory (1993) by The Sabres Of Paradise | Clock (1995) by Node

Weekend links 761

• At Bandcamp: Marc Masters on The Curious Case of the Channeled New Age Tape; and Erick Bradshaw’s guide to Nurse With Wound.

• At Public Domain Review: Designing the Sublime – Boullée and Ledoux’s Architectural Revolution by Hugh Aldersey-Williams.

• The fifth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

It does not follow that the scientific spirit of empirical inquiry runs against dreaming, and [André] Breton was wrong to think [Roger] Caillois’s investigative methods opposed wonder. Material mysticism led Caillois back to magical thinking, which he expanded further than the Surrealist interest in chance and coincidence as he probed for insights into the order of things. Caillois was equally, perhaps even more, fascinated with magic than the Surrealists, but he wanted to probe what might exist as phenomenally marvelous, beyond the subjective self—he was a scholar of the sacred, and from the episode of the jumping beans onwards, he looked for its character and its workings in actual phenomena. In this sense he was more of a believer—though not in a personal god or a religion. Where Breton exalted the perceiver, Caillois wanted to go beyond these anthropocentric limits.

Marina Warner on the imaginary logic of Roger Caillois

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – January 2025 at Ambientblog, and Unrush 093 at A Strangely Isolated Place.

• At Criterion.com: Reincarnations of a Rebel Muse – David Hudson on Delphine Seyrig.

• Old music renewed: Angherr Shisspa (Revisited) by Koenjihyakkei.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Laura Dern’s Day.

• Jussi Lehtisalo’s favourite music.

• Lynch music: The Beast (1956) by Milt Buckner | Honky Tonk (Part 1) (1958) by Bill Doggett | Something Wicked This Way Comes (1996) by Barry Adamson

Weekend links 759

Chance and Order, Change 6 (Monastral Blue) (1972) by Kenneth Martin.

• At Public Domain Review: Some of the media which will be entering the public domain (in the USA) in 2025, including links to Standard Ebooks for the book titles.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine’s regular report on the state of secondhand bookshops in Britain.

• At Colossal: Beams of light lance monumental architecture in Jun Ong’s astral installations.

• At Popular Mechanics: “A scientist proved paradox-free time travel is possible”.

• An interview with Alice Coltrane from 1981 for Piano Jazz Radio (NPR).

• Read 19 issues of Arthur magazine in PDF format. More coming soon!

• At Spoon & Tamago: Japanese Designer New Year’s cards of 2025.

• At the BFI: Pamela Hutchinson on 10 great films of 1925.

• Astral Traveling (1973) by Lonnie Liston Smith & The Cosmic Echoes | Astral Altar (The Gateway Of Legba) (1994) by Dub Terror Exhaust | Astral Melancholy Suite (2022) by Ghost Power

Weekend links 754

The Remains of Minotaur in a Harlequin Costume (1936) by Pablo Picasso. Via.

• At Rarefilmm: Long Live the New Flesh: The Films of David Cronenberg, a TV documentary from 1987 which includes contributions from Martin Scorsese and Stephen King. I wrote about this one years ago but at the time the only available copy was chopped into 10-minute segments.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Delinquent Elementals: A Pagan News Anthology, edited by Phil Hine & Rodney Orpheus.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine explores the possible influence of the Sherlock Holmes stories on Arthur Machen’s early fiction.

Perhaps there was a Super-Sargasso Sea in the upper atmosphere into which were carried objects from earth—frogs, fish, leaves—and from which they later rained. Perhaps the universe was a living thing, rains of blood its bleeding. Perhaps in 1903 the earth, in its orbit about the sun, passed through the remains of a world destroyed in an interplanetary dispute, the particles falling as rains of dust and redness. Perhaps humanity was controlled. “I think we’re property”, Fort wrote. Or, perhaps not; so skeptical he could not accept even his own authority, he had given up theorizing. “We have expressions: we don’t call them explanations: we’ve discarded explanations with beliefs.”

Joshua Blu Buhs on how Charles Fort came to write The Book of the Damned

• More Alan Moore: “Magic is not this big, spooky, dark thing that’s full of nightmares,” he tells Séamas O’Reilly at the Irish Times.

• High-resolution images of 14,000 woodblock illustrations and letterforms free to use at the Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp.

• New music: Music For Bus Stations by Rod Modell; and Between Soil And Sky by Tarotplane.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Denton Welch In Youth is Pleasure (1945).

• At the Quietus: The Strange World of…Irena and Vojtech Havlovi.

• Apollo Explorer

• Pagan Love Song (1959) by Martin Denny | Pagan Lovesong (Vibeakimbo) (1982) by Virgin Prunes | Pagan Sun Temple (2022) by Hawksmoor